discussion keeps the world turning.
This is Roundtable.
Hello, welcome to Roundtable where we serve up piping hot debates on the issues that sizzle in China and beyond.
I'm Niu Honglin.
If you think Chinese is just one language of one nation, you are mistaken.
It is now becoming a shared cultural currency.
From classrooms in Nairobi to dorm rooms in Berlin, from gaming communities in Tokyo to TikTok feeds in Sao Paulo, a quiet revolution is taking place.
Millions are learning Mandarin, not for tests, but for connection.
Behind this linguistic boom lies a deeper story, one about curiosity, identity and the power of culture to bridge worlds.
For this episode, I'm joined by Ding Heng and Steve Hatherly.
Now grab your virtual compass and follow us to the heart of the discussion.
Have you ever tried learning Chinese?
If so, you are part of a global wave.
Over 200 million people worldwide are now studying the language.
But this surge isn't just coming from classrooms or trade deals.
It's powered by pop culture.
Blockbuster games, viral shows, and social media trends.
From a teen in Johannesburg decoding the spells in Nezha to a Japanese student building a Jensen impact.
Chinese dictionary.
These new learners are redefining who studies Chinese and why.
Across continents, culture-driven folk tutorial systems are taking shape.
Today we explore this phenomenon just how big is this linguistic wave and what happens when learning Chinese turns from a classroom task into a global cultural celebration?
To make all that making sense, or to make all that having a bigger picture and background, let's first look at exactly how many people are learning Chinese, and is it really a?
Yeah, this is definitely a heating up global craze for learning Chinese language.
The latest figure from China's Ministry of Education suggests that 86 countries had included Chinese in their national education system as of September 2025, with a total of more than 200 million people across the world today learning or using this language.
In the United States.
For example, the total number of Chinese language learners on this US-based language online platform, Duolingo.
That's a very popular platform.
Everybody's used that at some point in their lives, right?
In the digital age, it's really universally accessible.
But on that platform, in the case of the United States, the number of Chinese learners grew by whopping 216 in just a little over a month.
At the end of Wow.
And since 2020, Chinese has ranked among the top 10 most learned languages on this platform.
And similarly in Africa, like more than a dozen.
Close to 20 countries have seen Chinese learning increase by over 30 in most recent years.
I was looking at, I saw that statistic from the United States, an increase of 216%.
And then I looked at the timing end of 2024.
And I was like, And I read some stories that's attributed, or at least in part attributed, to Red Note and the accessibility.
Remember that big story when all those American users came?
And the wonderful thing about that was not just the cool part of the story, but all of a sudden people from different cultures were interacting with each other that typically would not have done that.
And then all of a sudden it created this large curiosity about the Chinese language.
I mean, how many young Americans would be curious about learning anything about the Chinese language at all in their daily lives?
So that was one of the really cool side effects of that story.
Steve and I have another show, Takeaway Chinese, and that show has gone global on for well, I think, at least more than five or seven years.
And our podcast were put onto.
Well, all of the I think many of the podcast episodes were put onto different platforms and they basically stolen.
They have stolen it and then put it on their platform and use it as a way to monetize and everything.
But I kind of get it.
And as long as people are listening to the show and learning Chinese, we were happy about it.
But in 2023 the market, the Chinese learning market, was valued at 74 billion US dollars and it is projected to double by 2027.
And that is how. promising and how vibrantly developing the Chinese learning world is.
Yeah, and it's cool to see because I mean Mandarin's already the second most spoken language in the world anyway.
I was looking at stats from this year.
153 billion worldwide who spoke English either natively or as a second language, and that's just ahead of the Mandarin speakers at 118 billion at the time of the survey.
So you've got a language that's already spoken by over a billion people all around the world anyway plus, of course, the population here in China.
But to see it growing is still impressive.
And it's funny to see that people are doing different types of research and study about it.
And there's one team from Yangzhou University and they got a study called Big Data Monitoring, Forecasting and Strategies for Global Chinese Learning Demand.
Cool name.
And they analyzed more than 200,000 data samples collected from This is interesting.
Social media, e-commerce platforms and other real-life contests from over 100 countries and regions, and they found something pretty cool.
Global online searches related to learning Chinese have grown by about 15 in the past five years, and the vast potential of this expanding market in reality is that one of the project researchers noted that there are now over 20 private institutions worldwide offering Chinese language education.
It's impressive because worldwide there are already many relatively official and relatively the kind of project backed by different types of government cooperation projects and cultural exchange programs and people-to-people exchange programs.
And on top of that, a lot of private institutions are also entering the game.
And this is what happens when you have successful soft power projects like Nezha and Wukong.
Black Myth, Wukong.
The video game is that it inspires interest.
And Red Note as well.
We can use that as an example there too.
Because all of a sudden you have this interest that didn't exist before.
And those statistics that you mentioned before, those are growing by 10% every single year.
The private institutions offering Chinese... as a second language.
And in Canada, we have a lot of them too.
But I will say that the majority of the language centers for Chinese are based in bigger cities like Toronto and Vancouver.
Although in Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, where I'm from, there's a Chinese language learning center and cultural center there too that I found.
Toronto, actually, this is kind of cool to know.
Toronto is one of the most diverse cities on the planet, if not statistically the most diverse city on the planet.
And the census released from 2022 from the CBC talked about the fact that Mandarin became the second most common first language in Toronto after English.
Of the roughly 6 million people that live there, almost 280000 it's about 45 consider Mandarin their mother tongue.
So people are continuing to speak it and learn it in Toronto too.
So for the newcomers, those who are young, who have not been, let's say, having access to the Chinese language, just Why are they starting?
Why are they starting learning the language?
I mean, I know the major reasons being it's already a very much spoken language and it's very popular.
But exactly what makes it popular?
Well, I think powerful cultural symbols and IPs created by China in these years, in most recent years.
That's a big driver because, especially the younger generation of Chinese learners, they are often motivated somehow to try to understand those cultural contexts, the bigger cultural contexts, seeking to understand some vocabularies like immortal spells.
That's a term from Nezha, I guess, right?
I totally get that.
I don't know about you, Ding Hong, but when I was little, when I was reading Harry Potter series, I never really truly understood the spells.
And later on, when my English got a bit better, I realized that the spells have.
There's a structure in it.
There's a reason in it.
And a part of the structure.
Well, a part of the spell actually mean or have a relationship with the result of the spell you're casting as a wizard?
And that was... that has been a huge drive for me to keep learning English.
Oh, really?
Yeah, expanding my knowledge in that area.
So I totally get why people would want to learn more Chinese because of the spells in Nojia.
I think the things that we're talking about here and, of course, you've got your institutions that will teach business Chinese or things related to people's work
But when you have these types of things like...
The three body problem.
That's another good example, right?
That was an incredibly, incredibly popular piece of literature internationally speaking.
But when you have those types of things, then all of a sudden the language becomes cool.
The country becomes cool.
It becomes trendy.
And I'm not saying it's better, but I can say it as a comparison.
I saw this firsthand happen in Korea.
Exactly what they did they put their food on the map, which um was followed by or i don't know which came first.
But k-pop then came, and it inspired this interest in korean language too.
And now we're seeing that china is putting out stuff that young people think is really, really cool and it's making it trendy.
It's putting it in the media a lot and people want to learn about it, but from a practical point of view, economic drivers are still huge.
Exactly exactly.
That's an undeniable force, because we're talking about the increasing or the accelerated.
Let's put it this way
CIE would be a good example, right?
It's a perfect example.
It's happening right now.
Yeah, CIE is more focused on the import aspect, but in the meantime, the accelerated export of Chinese products products, services and technologies and culture.
These are all things because China represents the world's second largest economy, that's for sure, and a primary trading partner for more than 140 countries and regions across the world.
So there is definitely a realistic need to engage with China from a business and a commercial perspective.
Because, for many doing international trade, knowing how to speak Chinese is really viewed as a practical, useful skill to overcome these language barriers.
Make your financial transaction, your cooperation, more efficient, more efficient.
And in the meantime, let's also not forget about the technological and issues behind it.
Because, like this Dolingo platform we mentioned earlier, it was the fruits of technological incubation.
I think.
5G, AI, and virtual reality these technologies, they can also enhance our learning experiences.
And at the end of the day, I think learning a new foreign language for any individual, it can be engaging and vivid and interesting, rather than being engulfed in all these jargons and grammar, boring things right.
Didn't have a chance to share this yesterday when we were doing the CIE related show, but I saw this example and it's very cute a Afghanistan exchange students in China.
After learning Chinese for several years, he was very familiar with the Chinese market and he realized that not a lot of Afghanistan products or local products specialties are here in the country.
So he decided to bring one of their most renowned products, that is, a blanket, handmade blanket or carpet, from his country to the Chinese market and he managed to brought to bring about 2000 ones, and that is equal to 2000 households revenue, annual revenue, And that's how big the market is and how lucrative learning a language might be.
It's definitely beneficial.
A friend of mine, I met up with him maybe three months ago.
He was in Beijing as part of his business trip.
He was off to Shanghai after a brief stop in Beijing.
And he was talking about doing business in China.
And that's why he was here to meet with some companies.
And he had a translator with him and he told me that he was learning uh, chinese because he wanted to be able to have those meetings himself in the future, because it's just more of a more of a personal way of doing things rather than speaking through a translator.
But he said as well that um, you know, when he considered getting the translator or not, He thought it was important at the time, but even still now he tries to use some of the Chinese that he knows, which is very limited.
But he said it's received very well in the business meetings when he's speaking with these other CEOs.
The attempt to speak the language is very much appreciated.
That's what I wanted to ask a little bit, especially one thing who mentioned that with the development of technology, it's easier to learn a language?
But at the same time, it's easier not to learn the language.
You do not have to learn the language anymore with a translator with a smart glasses on your face.
You don't really really need to.
But judging by the actual situation, the status quo we're looking at right now, instead of having less Chinese learning students, we are looking at more.
Why, do you think?
Is that?
Well, I think if you're, if you're using those translators for travel purposes, then sure, that's going to be greatly beneficial for you if you're in the country for a short time.
But if you are doing something with your life that is related to China and you're interacting with Chinese speakers on a daily basis or a weekly or monthly basis, then it definitely is because, number one oftentimes translators don't do it properly and and they miss the cultural nuances right in the speech.
But second, we're still human beings and people like it when people speak to other people directly and it shows intent, and it shows effort, and it shows sincerity.
So I think as great as those translators are, they're not perfect for every situation.
Yeah, I think.
Still curiosity about another culture.
That's the elephant in the room because I have known somebody near me or very close to me.
They have used the Duolingo to study Italian, to study French, to study Spanish.
They study all three languages at the same time.
And ultimately the ultimate driver was that this person was very much curious uh, have a very much curiosity about european culture.
So, and looking forward to european traveling to europe one day.
And that's could be confusing, you might say like oh, but i get it also because when i was in taiwan that the provincial capital of my hometown province, Shanxi province,
I think it's 10 years ago at least seven years ago I saw this little bakery, and the Chinese name for the little bakery is Jia Tu Xian Sheng.
I didn't understand.
I thought maybe it has something to do with the founder or anything.
And then, when I was learning French on Duolingo, one day I suddenly saw the French word for cake is gâteau.
And I realized, oh, Mr. Gatou is actually Mr. Cake or anything.
So that moment at least gave me the drive to keep learning it for several more years.
And I get it if you can have the same kind of moment in learning Chinese.
It's definitely super cool.
But we're generalizing the Chinese learners further.
Till now, we're talking about, oh, they learn the language because of this and that.
But different people from different backgrounds and different age, they have different reasons.
Yeah, I mean the demographic differences among the students and also the geographical regions where they live in the world.
That would kind of separate the groups depending on their demands or their needs for learning for the language right.
And if you separate them into groups, the younger people, the under 35s that's often the biggest group, by the way.
They're frequently drawn by the things that we mentioned before the cultural IPs, the games, the dramas.
Maybe we didn't mention those yet, but those are internationally successful now as well.
And they're looking for vocabulary or background skills, structures that are related to cultural concepts from the things that they're interested in, like the games or the dramas or something like that.
Regionally in Southeast Asia, 82 of those who are learning Chinese are doing so for professional development, and those fall into that under 35 group as well.
So they have skill combinations like Chinese plus live streaming or Chinese plus e-commerce, and those are now must-haves among young professionals.
Also in Thailand, there's an example of a young Thai content creator who goes live on e-commerce platforms almost every evening and he works at a cross-border company in Bangkok and he's learning Chinese so that he can communicate directly with his Chinese customers and confidently present during those live streams, which again goes back to the point of I mean, here we're talking business, but building.
A sincere trust and connection with your customers.
Yes, it's cool.
It's fun.
It's practical.
It's easier than before, but not to say there are no challenges to overcome already.
We still face certain challenges.
By saying we, I mean the Chinese learners out there, as well as those who are providing Chinese education to overseas students, students or those who are just enthusiastic about learning the language.
What are the major challenges?
Well, number one is probably this access to resources is a little bit or very much actually unbalanced between major and smaller places, because large metropolitan areas They have plenty of resources and access to Chinese learning resources, but those smaller and medium-sized cities, or either more remotely located places, locations they are experiencing very rapid growth in demand, but they're really struggling with shortage in terms of the resources.
And I guess there is a mismatch between the supply of teaching material and the demands on the part of learners.
Because, according to this Yangzhou University report, this report has highlighted a substantial portion of global Chinese learners, somewhere between 70 and 80.
They are still at a very initial beginner's level.
Those overseas markets often sees a lack of those beginner-focused textbooks because I guess the existing resources, teaching resources, the existing textbooks, for example, are generally concentrated on intermediate or more higher-level learners.
That's a problem.
So there's not enough material available.
For the beginning students, yeah.
I think it has something to do with the fact that it's only starting to take off, in the sense that globally it's becoming a huge wave, but it's the starting point of it.
Only 200 million people are learning the language.
Well, yeah, and in a case like this, oftentimes the demand will spike out of nowhere.
That didn't exist before.
Which means you didn't have enough preparation for it just yet.
Exactly.
And that's the way it has to go.
It has to go in that direction.
Otherwise, it wouldn't be seen as a good business decision.
And, to be honest, when we were starting Takeaway Chinese at the very beginning we did research on the podcast platforms and see how many podcast platforms are there related to Chinese learning.
We didn't find much.
But these days, when I search Chinese learning, Chinese-related content on podcast platforms, there are many.
So we are already looking at a growing... growing in the making of the material.
Yeah, I did a When we first moved to Beijing over a year ago now.
One of the first things I did was an online search of what types of resources I
I could find and I did find a lot of podcast stuff and I found a lot of stuff from expats who live in China, who speak Chinese very, very well, and then this is part of what they do is teach, but I haven't complained about that.
They speak way too quickly from lesson Okay.
No, usually it goes.
Lesson number one ni hao.
Lesson number two.
Wait, wait, what happened between lesson number... I got ni hao.
But something happened that I didn't catch.
And so this is my complaint is that and this is part of the challenges to answer this question of yours too?
Mandarin can be a very, very intimidating thing for native English speakers or any non-Chinese speaker.
Because, number one, we have the, the chinese characters that look like pictures right, and and we've never seen anything like that before there's nothing to relate.
There's nothing to relate in our own language there.
So that's very intimidating.
And then also, you know, chinese doesn't sound similar to french or german or spanish or so.
Again for, to use all, to use native english speakers as an example, it's tough to find a starting point.
So for these podcasts and for takeaway chinese that we do together, i think you know, rolling things out slowly and in a place where we can feel like okay, I got that.
Beginner's level, making it fun.
Baby level.
That would be very helpful.
But that's just my personal opinion.
And that's for online content.
And when there are enough choices among the online content, you can go for the beginner's level or the baby level.
You can go for the medium ones.
And also there are sophisticated lessons, of course.
But besides that, we have a lot of different types of institutions and a lot of government, like we mentioned in the earlier stage of our conversation.
They are including Chinese learning in their national education plan.
They are providing Chinese lessons, and they're doing even more than that.
There are more opportunities to have interaction with Chinese people and Chinese society directly nowadays.
Yeah, which is another big benefit too.
Where you've got international Chinese education growing in countries, then having access to the humanistic side of things is a big benefit.
Otherwise it just kind of remains this kind of intangible thing that you are just kind of learning through a computer or something like that.
Yeah, so in these kind of institutions, you get to learn the language.
If you're really good, it can take.
Different types of standard tests would give you an idea of where are you on the Chinese learning ladder.
And then you might, as a teenager, sometimes high school students you can join summer camp to China, go visit Chinese cities and universities and just have a bit more fun and really learn a bit more about the Chinese language.
So if you're really interested, please leave a comment in the comment section.
Let us know how you're learning Chinese and what's your reasons and maybe what levels you are.
